Just read an article over at mmocrunch.com about the Darkfall alliance battles between guilds. The system to attack and defend a city seems to need some tweaking but the size of the battles looks promising. What was interesting though was that the article showed a map made by some Darkfall players which details the alliances and guild locations on Darkfall’s continent map (at the end of the post).

This map shows where each guild is located, the size of the guild (visually) and which guilds are allied with one another. From looking at the map it reminds me of Planetside which was an MMOFPS that had three main factions fighting over hotspots across multiple continents. Like a game of risk, you can see on the Darkfall map where certain alliances have been trying to expel other guilds from islands or surrounding territory.

What pains me is that the community had to build this map. Darkfall only has so many locations to build a city upon. These locations should be displayed on in-game maps and should display which guilds control them (along with other information such as resources, buildings or other guild information). I’ve written about the need to build political and social tools into games before, especially MMOs. Right now the Darkfall map only seems to be useful to figure out where your enemies are but in the future maybe it will lead to other forms of conflict resolutions. Guilds may find that they cannot push everyone out from their surround land meaning negotiations and mediation will have to become a part of the game’s politics. In-game political tools can help achieve this intricate gameplay that will make the game much richer.

Hopefully the developers are watching what the community is doing and will respond with more integrated solutions.

OnLive is a new service that offers on-demand games (some news articles here, here, and here). Except instead of being online in the browser (like gog.com or gametap.com) or on a console (like downloadable content), OnLive is everywhere. They achieve this by running games on their own servers instead of having the player’s machine install and process games.

Each OnLive customer gets an OnLive “micro-console” which is basically a small box that takes in input/output devices (controllers and keyboard/mouse, video, and audio) and plugs into your ethernet port to connect to the internet. This micro-console can connect to any TV or a program can be installed on a computer to simulate the micro-console. Since the games are all processed on OnLive’s servers the only thing that is sent to the customer is video, so no major machine is needed.

Obviously OnLive has massive implications for gaming in general. It may get rid of the need to have consoles or the need to find demos when deciding whether to buy a game (since the newest games will be immediately available). On the negative side it gets rid of modding and other forms of customization that people enjoy when they buy a full fledge game, having access to the software.

What I actually found the most interesting however is the tangential features that OnLive brings to the world of gaming. These include the community features that OnLive is offering. Features like: live streams of gameplaying, recorded gameplay footage and tagging/rating/commenting on footage.

A few weeks ago I talked about the concept of ludovestigums or recorded player experiences. OnLive is a new platform for players to share their ludovestigums in extremely easy ways. These recorded experiences are not the same as game ghosts, or ludophasmas, which allow players to play with the experiences but they are still experiences that can be shared with other players by sharing gameplay footage. Yet, OnLive allows for players to not just view recorded experiences but interact with current game experiences, or ludoexhibeos.

Spectating in games is nothing new, professional game tournaments have made use of spectating through video (online stream, TV) or in game engines (spectating Counter Strike games while running the engine). In OnLive, players can spectate other player’s gameplay in real-time and then some. What OnLive is doing is adding the concept of actively participating while spectating another player’s game. For instance while a player is watching another player’s gameplay they can rate their performance. This ludoexhibeo, real-time game experience, thus takes on the same type of feel as a ludophasma, allowing the spectator to interact with the real time experience that another player is having, even having the ability to affect the experience as well.

Privacy issues come up when discussing these features but so long as players do not care their gameplay footage is being released I only see great things coming out of OnLive. Not to mention that once game experiences are recorded players can use them in different ways. For instance, just today I wanted to find a specific game event that occurred in Fallout 3. If OnLive offers records of gameplay footage, and saved games, players can tag and catalog game instances that will make finding content inside of games much easier. It will really help out us game scholars that like to find specific instances in games that show our theories and findings.

OnLive is offering ludovestigums in an immediate sense with ludoexhibeos. While it may not be sentient ludophasmas that embody the spirit of a past player, making it easier to interact with real-time game experiences is a good start.

It is not all in my head that Head Balter and Head Six are the joker and the thief from the song All Along The Watchtower? I kept wondering which two characters were going to represent those two characters from the song. Then that means our civilization is the watchtower.

The series finale of Battlestar Galactica was last night and it was great in my opinion. I feel they sewed up pretty much everything. The Opera house connection was handled well; the small cease fire moment between Cavil’s forces and Galactica was a little strange but all right. Tyrol killing Tory when he learned she killed his wife was realistic. I liked that the couples’ storylines were finished: Tigh/Ellen, Helo/Athena, Kara/Anders, Balter/Caprica Six, Adama/Roslin. Especially thought Roslin’s death was done in a great way.

The show was also funny and had some really great moments. When Roslin thanks Doc Cottle for helping her survive for so long and the Doc did not have a witty come back, priceless. Another great dialog was after Anders was hooked up to the CIC and Tigh says to Adama “You can still throw them all out the airlock,” which Adama replies “It would take too long.” Yet another was when Baltar and Caprica Six both see their Head replicas of each other and say to one another “You can see them too?” The visualizations throughout the episode were great. Finally, the realization that Kara had lead the Galactica to the exact rendezvous coordinates where the fleet was going and that they found our planet, the second Earth, pushed everything together.

Some of the other great moments were the flashbacks. Boomer’s flashback to her saying she owed Adama was interesting because we have seen Boomer go through so much. Then there were Roslin’s flashbacks that pushed her to get back into politics and really life. The best one was Kara’s and Lee flashback that found Kara almost cheating on Lee’s brother Zak with Lee until they were unexpectedly broken up.

Ron Moore stated in an interview that he felt Kara and Lee never left that moment and they were in a perpetual state of wanting to be with each other but could not. It makes sense and in the end when Kara disappears when Lee is talking to her that was probably the most controversial part of the episode. I feel Kara, Starbuck, was the hero though, she was just riding off into the sunset. I’m not disappointed that Kara and Lee didn’t end up together in the end or that we do not know more about the powers that brought Kara back to life. Something in the story had to be left open and Starbuck deserves it.

In the end we are all Cylons, which I had a feeling we all were going to be anyways. When the Galactica arrived there were already humans living on Earth (the second Earth) so the remnants of the fleet just spread out, ultimately mating with the evolving humans. Ever wonder where the knowledge to build the pyramids came from, now we know. The episode ended with the connection to our own civilization and how it is now our choice to break the cycle of battling our own creations. All in all, I was impressed with the episode and I am excited to hear the episode commentary. There is also ‘The Plan’ and ‘Caprica’ to look forward too. Battlestar Galactica is not over yet.

P.S. I did hate the fact that they killed Racetrack. She was my favorite side character; she was as sassy and rough as Starbuck and probably as good a pilot as Athena. Plus, she was sent on every harebrain mission that Galactica came up with, they could have thrown her a bone (I didn’t care about Skulls though ). I was always pissed that she was part of the mutiny but I guess she did get to nuke the Cylon base in the end. That’s at least something.

When I got the email today that Mary Flanagan’s group over at the Tiltfactor Lab and the Values at Play project made a game about the economy named Layoff I was ecstatic. It was only a matter of time before game designers jumped on this horrible economic situation we are all in and try to make some sense out of it through the use of play. Especially since there has been a number of great visualizations and videos made about the economy. My favorite was done by Jonathan Jarvis.

However after playing Layoff I’m quite underwhelmed by its reflection on the economy. The game puts the player into the shinny shoes of a corporate manager and is charged with the task of laying off workers to save corporate cash. The tutorial for the game makes this clear with a very arrogate sounding businessman telling the player the rules to the game. Actually if the player does not play the tutorial first, which I did not the first time, they lose the main theme of the game (which is that they are a corporate big-wig and cannot get laid off). When I started the game without the tutorial I thought I was just the average, god-like player that had to make the choice over who was laid off and would be shown the consequences (which are not really shown).

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I was turned on to Cursor*10 by the great Offworld blog. This puzzle game gives players a minute to try and get through a multiple room level to the end. The problem is that the obstacles in the various rooms do not allow the player to get through the level alone in one round. This is why the player gets ten rounds. In each round the player’s cursor movements and clicks are recorded. These records then show up in each subsequent round so that the player is actually playing with themselves, solving the game together. For instance, one obstacle requires a player to click on a box 99 times to get into the next room. Impossible in a minute but with two or three other cursor records clicking the player can get by quickly. It forces the player to strategize how to use each cursor round.

Cursor*10 really hit me because this is the type of stuff that I am doing for my thesis. Recording player data, analyzing it and having the data affect the game in different ways. While Cursor*10 is not analyzing the data it is using recorded data in a novel way. It combines playing with an intelligent player and an ephemeral being, something that was once there but now only a trace is left. I call these Ludophasmas, materialized game spirits, and they offer a way to leave marks in digital games.

One newer game that makes use of Ludophasmas is Mirror’s Edge (ME). In ME’s time trial mode a player can race over rooftops to try and get the best time. Each time a player races they have the ability to save their race data. Next time they play they can race against their own “ghost” which appears as a red, semi-transparent racer in the level (see below). Players can then trade their ghosts with other players, making these Ludophasmas appear in multiple player’s games.

This is very different from the standard high-score screens which have been used since the early arcade days to record player information. Not only are the player’s with the fastest race times given a permanent place in ME’s history but any player can call up a ludophasma that replays that player’s game experience, a ludivestigum (a recorded game experience, just to stick with latin). Going beyond a high score, which can only be viewed as a benchmark for every other player, a player can learn from a ludivestigum. A tutoring interaction is brought into the game, players watch the best players and learn the most optimized way to play.

These ludivestigums are being gathered more and more in games. Recording replays in RTS (Warcraft 3) or FPS (Counter Strike) games have been used often, especially by the professional game competitions to show off their tournament games. Ghost data in racing games is pretty common as well, I race against my ghosts all the time in Mario Kart. Now these ludivestigums are turning into actual experiences that can be shared between players as with the ME ghost time trials. How much is it going to take to use these ludivestigums to produce ludophasmas that can act beyond just replaying the recorded actions of a player?

What every business tries to do with recorded analytic data is to figure out what their user’s motivations and preferences are. Businesses sift through user actions in order to find something that can be used to predict what a user will do in the future (obvious marketing potential). If this can be achieved it brings up another capability, if one can predict what a user will do in the future could not an artificial user be created that acts like the original user? Infused with the same drives and goals of the original player a ludophasma could play games as an artificial player. In a way this would create a living ghost of that player, one that could virtually interact with other live players. This would allow players to live on even after death and interact with their ancestors (maybe even be placed in a robot body to physically interact with them?).

In the future, will we watch replays of Warcraft 3 games or play against recorded Counter Strike NPCs that are infused with our loved one’s ludivestigums in order to be closer to them? Will these be the next form of cherished mementos that we will keep, right next to the digital photos, flash videos or cell phone messages? What if your loved one has past-on, can these ludivestigums be a glimpse into their psyche or decision making processes? What if a program could be built that combines that loved one’s ludivestigums and creates a ludophasma that simulates their same behavior, making it capable of playing new games or just interacting in general? How close would you want to get to realizing Philip K. Dick’s “half-life” beings in his book Ubik?

There is just so much data out there these days that represent our past selves and yet these questions are seldom talked about. People are leaving behind their footprints everywhere and it’s getting easier to store them. Digital artifacts can be copied, stored, even altered if the user chooses but a user can’t interact with the actual people in a photo or movie besides photoshopping them out. What happens when the traces that people are leaving behind allow us to not only see and hear them but also allows us to play with them, to really experience them again? I wish I had some huge insight to end on but I truly do not have any answers. We will have to see where our ludophasmas lead us.